New York
Veronica Lee
He may describe himself as “a Geordie chancer”, but in reality Jason Cook is a warm comic whose material is utterly devoid of cynicism. Yet he’s far from being pious - he spices up his act with caustic barbs for deserving targets (quite often himself) and has a raft of sharp putdowns for hecklers who think they’re wittier than he is.Jason Cook, The Stand ****
Much of his material is autobiographical, but Cook subtly weaves in the occasional untruth for added levity. And despite the sly sexual references in his act, he is the antithesis of the modern misogynistic comic, an uxorious bloke who Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Since his death at the San Marino Grand Prix in 1994, the legend of charismatic Brazilian racing driver Ayrton Senna has grown to almost mythic proportions. Last year the three-time world champion was voted Best Driver in F1 History in a drivers’ poll in Autosport magazine, and a new documentary about his career is due in cinemas this autumn from Working Title Films.More remarkably, an opera about Senna’s life has been jointly commissioned by New York’s Metropolitan Opera and English National Opera. Due to premiere in London in autumn 2012, Senna (as it’s called) will feature music by Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Let me lay a friendly fiver that many critics will rubbish this film, for the following reasons. It’s a romcom, and a Hollywood one at that, the lowest form of cinematic life for many (most often male) critics; it stars Catherine Zeta-Jones, whose career has gone from British television mediocrity to Hollywood royalty, a heinous crime for some; and its story, about a 40-year-old mother of two who falls in love with a guy 15 years her junior, is a reverse parallel of Zeta-Jones’s own personal life (her husband, Michael Douglas, is 25 years older than she). Just listen to those knives being Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Jeff Goldblum is a big guy, 6'4" tall to be precise, and, though his character inhabits an improbably spacious, high-ceilinged New York apartment, he roves around it like a crazy caged animal in this intensely athletic and entertaining revival of Neil Simon's disturbing 1971 comedy. There's an unmissable topicality to the theme - the cataclysmic effect of redundancy on a high-earning executive - and, while the production doesn't underline this or update the story, it comes up looking as fresh as paint - fresher, certainly, than the overpriced, sweaty, crumbling hellhole where the action is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It wasn't memorialised in HD. But last night Ringo Starr turned 70 and welcomed Paul McCartney onstage at Radio City Music Hall in New York for a musical celebration. There was only one song they were going to perform, and a thousand mobile phone cameras were duly held aloft to capture it. The results have sprouted overnight on YouTube, and they all have the grainy shakycam quality of all that old footage from the Cavern Club. If you're of the Fabophiliac persuasion you'll no doubt be wanting to devour the lot. Which you can do right here on theartsdesk.This is the closest to the stage, so Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Two leading ballerinas retired this week on either side of the Atlantic, Darci Kistler of New York City Ballet and Miyako Yoshida of the Royal Ballet. Both are in their mid-forties (not old for a ballerina) and each is an exemplar of certain best qualities of their companies, yet each seems to have outstayed their welcome in some way. Each farewell lights the touchpaper of argument as to whether those best qualities are institutional or personal - and therefore whether they can be preserved and transmitted - or whether the image that ballet neurotically clings to, of being ever-modernising, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
n Woody Allen’s Whatever Works, Larry David plays the fourth-wall-breaking narrator and protagonist Boris Yetnikoff. In his early sixties, Boris is an atheist, hypochondriac, divorcee, failed suicide, blowhard existentialist, and world-class curmudgeon, who’s abandoned his career as a nearly-Nobel-level physicist. He’s the most acridly loquacious - and easily the funniest - Woody Allen manqué yet, vehement in his conviction that life is futile, ready to assume that he has thyroid cancer, who wakes screaming “The horror! The horror!”, as mouthed by Kurtz in Heart of Darkness (and Apocalypse Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Charity begins at home - or maybe not - in Nicole Holofcener's lovely film, Please Give, which joins the superlative Greenberg as one of the beacons in a summer movie line-up given over to sequels, franchises and pitches that should never have got beyond the story board. (Die, Killers, die!) Like a kinder, gentler Woody Allen, and without the peculiar prurience that has crept into Allen's films as he's got older, writer-director Holofcener anatomises middle-class Manhattanites in all their ever-mutable contradictions. This is the sort of film where a mother won't fork out dosh to a teenage Read more ...
howard.male
With the last ever series of Big Brother dominating Channel Four’s schedules for the rest of the summer, the first TV screening of this Sundance Film Festival award-winner couldn’t have been better timed. Because the chillingly disconcerting “art project” that dot-com pioneer Josh Harris devised back in 1999 (just before Big Brother came on air for the first time) made the world’s most controversial reality TV show look like Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation, by comparison. American film director Ondi Timoner’s documentary is an unsettling look at Harris’s struggle to find himself which could be Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the musical theatre (Paradise Found, anyone?), along comes The Fantasticks, and we are returned to square one. How can this be, I hear you asking, given the record book entries clocked up by a Tom Jones/ Harvey Schmidt confection that ran Off Broadway continuously for over four decades before closing in 2002? (It then reopened at a midtown Manhattan venue in 2006.) Well, what may seem charming and whimsical in one context can be wince-inducing in another. Let's just say that I arrived at The Fantasticks infinitely willing to surrender to its Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For the past decade or so, New York City has been bragging about its crime figures. Homicides are through the floor, whole fleets of firepower-toting cops are out there hassling hustlers, and the mean streets have been swept pretty much clean. I don’t think the creators of Brooklyn’s Finest can have got the press release. In their version of reality, the body count is off the chart as blood pumps, spurts and leaks from innumerable gunshot wounds, all of them faked up with a gleeful eye for detail. It reminds you of the end of The Duchess of Malfi, only it’s a gore bath all the way through.The Read more ...
howard.male
My excuse is that I was comfortably settled on the sofa next to my wife when the first episode of Glee aired, and I just got drawn in. I know, it’s not much of an excuse - and it hardly explains the fact that I then went on to watch the next 20 episodes - but there we are. And as a heterosexual middle-aged ex-punk rocker, I’m certainly not the obvious target demographic for this latest American television phenomenon, so perhaps I should explain further.Glee is probably the most aptly named TV show ever devised, in that the dictionary defines “glee” as “open delight or pleasure; exultant joy; Read more ...